Re: Guidelines for instruction set design?

On Tue, 12 May 2009 12:17:44 GMT, anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at
(Anton Ertl) wrote:


>George Neuner <gneuner2@comcast.net> writes:
>>C99 specifies multi-byte characters and makes a distinction between a
>>"basic character" whose bit pattern must fit into a single byte, and a
>>"wide character" which may require multiple bytes to express.
>
>Having recently looked at that part of C99, there is the "basic
>character set" and the "extended character set". Members of the basic
>character set fit in a char. Members of the extended character set
>may not fit into a char and may need a wide character (wchar_t) or a
>multi-byte character (several chars in a char[]), but some may also
>fit in a char.


Yes ... basic characters fit into a char <type> whereas extended
characters may or may not. However, I'm referring to the definitions
of environmental terms in Section 3. There you see definitions for
"byte", "character", "multibyte character" and "wide character".




>>[Historical note: C was first implemented on the GE 635
>
>Hmm, I thought it was the PDP-11.
>
AFAIK, C was developed on PDP-11. I believe John may be thinking of
Thompson's original work on Unix. Thompson bootstrapped the PDP-7 by
cross assembling from a GE-635.


George
[I could have sworn that Ritchie said that it worked first on the 635, but
his 1993 paper says it was indeed PDP-11 first, then ported to the 635 and
IBM 360/370 by 1973. http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/chistory.ps -John]

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